KEY TOPICS: South Asia, race discrimination, marriage, Unilever
SUMMARY: Not included.
The commercials claim "Fair & Lovely" will lighten your skin in just a few weeks. For you men, there's a complementary product that will produce similar results and it's called, "Fair & Handsome." Touted by Bollywood celebrities, like Shah Rukh Khan, skin whitening creams are positioned as a viable solution to your social problems. That's right: you've got problems. But, from the comfort of your own bathroom, you can transform your life. Let me be clear: Unilever's sales pitch rests on the premise that your brown skin adversely affects your chances of long-standing social success in any sphere of life, but most of all your marriage prospects - and, yes, marry you must.
Both India and Bangladesh broadcast Unilever's commercials on a regular basis to their growing middle-class - made up of future brides and grooms, let's not forget - who, no matter the GDP of their respective countries, can still be fairly retrograde in their social views. In a region where weddings are considered the penultimate experience, and marriage the most enviable of social contracts, a "lovely" bride or "handsome" groom is an absolute asset. If you're brown, you're all too aware of the dangerously shallow perception that the loveliest and most handsome are also the fairest. But this doesn't sound fair at all.
So 'race' doesn't just headline American newspapers, it's a hot-button issue in South Asia, too. Except in India and Bangladesh there's no real race debate just an age-old tradition of racial discrimination that's yet to become politicized. No doubt the region is overburdened with social problems, like gender inequality, illiteracy, urban poverty and ecological degradation. For exactly that reason, the matter of intra-class racism seems rather insignificant. So it'll largely go unnoticed by news media outlets, who, let's face it, have a vested (i.e., monetary) interest in promoting their own society's ideals of beauty. Today, corporations, like Unilever, and national broadcasting companies fundamentally need one another.
Now that I've left South Asia, "whitening" is something I associate more with teeth than skin - it's all about context, isn't it? Yet a year of regular exposure to Unilever's television and print ads really did get under my skin. As a teacher-activist, mainstream media's propagation of societal prejudices would, of course, get under my skin. While as a progressive Indo-Canadian female, I would be deeply troubled by the concept of skin lightening for beautification purposes.
The obsession with light anything has much to do with ideals of cleanliness and purity or, seen another way, of hygiene and morality. These couplings aren't natural but, through various discourses, evolved over time. Crossing cultural and geographical boundaries, they finally rooted themselves in your mind and my own. From the slave trade to the eugenics movement, ghettoes and camps to apartheid systems of government, race as a social marker has been employed in ways that deliberately limit the life chances of whole groups of people. "Fair & Lovely," think about it, are you not doing something of the sort in your part of the world?
SUMMARY: Not included.
Both India and Bangladesh broadcast Unilever's commercials on a regular basis to their growing middle-class - made up of future brides and grooms, let's not forget - who, no matter the GDP of their respective countries, can still be fairly retrograde in their social views. In a region where weddings are considered the penultimate experience, and marriage the most enviable of social contracts, a "lovely" bride or "handsome" groom is an absolute asset. If you're brown, you're all too aware of the dangerously shallow perception that the loveliest and most handsome are also the fairest. But this doesn't sound fair at all.
So 'race' doesn't just headline American newspapers, it's a hot-button issue in South Asia, too. Except in India and Bangladesh there's no real race debate just an age-old tradition of racial discrimination that's yet to become politicized. No doubt the region is overburdened with social problems, like gender inequality, illiteracy, urban poverty and ecological degradation. For exactly that reason, the matter of intra-class racism seems rather insignificant. So it'll largely go unnoticed by news media outlets, who, let's face it, have a vested (i.e., monetary) interest in promoting their own society's ideals of beauty. Today, corporations, like Unilever, and national broadcasting companies fundamentally need one another.
Now that I've left South Asia, "whitening" is something I associate more with teeth than skin - it's all about context, isn't it? Yet a year of regular exposure to Unilever's television and print ads really did get under my skin. As a teacher-activist, mainstream media's propagation of societal prejudices would, of course, get under my skin. While as a progressive Indo-Canadian female, I would be deeply troubled by the concept of skin lightening for beautification purposes.
The obsession with light anything has much to do with ideals of cleanliness and purity or, seen another way, of hygiene and morality. These couplings aren't natural but, through various discourses, evolved over time. Crossing cultural and geographical boundaries, they finally rooted themselves in your mind and my own. From the slave trade to the eugenics movement, ghettoes and camps to apartheid systems of government, race as a social marker has been employed in ways that deliberately limit the life chances of whole groups of people. "Fair & Lovely," think about it, are you not doing something of the sort in your part of the world?
